I was following up on the Dubai marathon action which happened on Jan 16th (yes, that’s a Friday, and the weekly holiday in the UAE), but could not get a chance to write about it till now. This event has been happening for many years now, but it is only in the last few years it has started getting some light in the running world, and that is because they have been able to pull in Gebreselassie for the event, and with a promise of no less than an attempt at the world record (which currently stands in Gebreselassie’s name at 2:03:59, set in Berlin last year).
Gebreselassie had run this event in 2008 and had narrowly missed the record that time. He was guaranteed USD 250,000 for winning the event, and an additional whopping USD 1 million for a WR! This time also, he ran a great race and was on world record pace till about 32KM mark, but then it did not happen exactly as planned. The last of the pacers left, the weather turned windy with opposite winds, and it started pouring heavily. Still, given all this, Gebreselassie still managed to run the race in 2:05:29, still the 8th all time fastest run in history. BTW, Gebreselassie has 4 of the 8 world best times, including #1, #2, and #3.
So, the people organizing this run have thrown the big money to get big names come to their event and raise its visibity and popularity. Gebreselassie has been criticized in some sections too, with these runs being labeled more of a “time-trial” for him rather than a competition, which is true since no one comes even close to him, and he is but guaranteed a first place. Gebreselassie is also accused of staying away from events where the real competition happens, where the worlds top marathoners compete together, like London, or the recently held Beijing Olympics. I don’t know what to make of it, but there seems to be some truth in it.
While reading up on the Dubai marathon, I found a very interesting site dedicated to the Science aspect of competitive sports, called The Science of Sports. It is a gem of a website, and has excellent technical analysis of various aspects related to performance in sports. They analyzed Gebreselassie’s Dubai performance and compared it to the WR Berlin run to analyze what went wrong. An excellent read!
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
yeah, you are correct about the way he picks his races, but come-on, he is a professional runner, he has to run for the sake of money. He has already run a lot of competition in the past years. Also, if you would have seen the olympics, he did run the 10,000 m track event and stood 6th overall. He did not run the marathon because of his asthma problem, which caused him to drop out of the london marathon last year.
Cheers,
Guru.